The rise of renewal and architectural change and infrastructure that Bogota lived during the first decades of the twentieth century was determined by specific economic interests that redefined its urban structure. Specifically the east bank of the Rio Arzobispo, located north of the traditional city, was for two decades example of bourgeois ownership and a new land use. This process of gentrification, framed by administrative decisions that promoted ideas such as modernization, hygiene and progress, results crucial to understand not only the dynamics of urban growth during this period, but, fundamentally, the concept of city to its citizen. Keywords: Urban history, Urban sanitization, Gentrification, Modernization.